The Process Universe
Natural Reality is the Incoherence that opens the door to a universe made of processes.
We feel separate and we feel connected. This chapter shows how both work together. Natural processes transform between domains, converting an ocean of happening into islands of meaning and back again.
When you see yourself as island and ocean at once, you find where you stand at the interpretation boundary and what you can reach.
Welcome to the Blue Space.
Contents
12.1 How Progress is Made
12.2 The Ocean We Are
12.2.1 The Flow of Causation
12.2.2 The Limits of Maps
12.2.3 Inside and Outside
12.2.4 Inseparable Waters
12.2.5 Between One and Many
12.3 Transformation
12.3.1 Mathematical and Natural Transforms
12.3.2 The Tree as Process
12.4 Our Position
12.4.1 The Interpretation Boundary
12.4.2 The Reachable Universe
12.5 Living as Process
12.6 Closing Remarks
12.1 How Progress is Made
A king sought to free his beloved from a high tower, locked behind an impenetrable door. His finest advisors arrived with intricate strategies. One recommended a more complex lock, believing only an advanced mechanism could break the original. Another argued for a smaller, more precise design. Craftsmen worked tirelessly, forging locks of every size and intricacy. Nothing worked.
A locksmith arrived. Unlike the others, he saw what they had all missed: what opens a lock isn’t another lock, but a key.
The same story appears everywhere. For centuries, people tried to build flying machines by refining wing designs. The Wright brothers succeeded by focusing on lift principles instead. The mind-body problem assumes mind and body are separate entities needing connection. Natural Reality sidesteps the problem by showing both as interpretations of one process existing in orthogonal domains.
Progress happens when we stop trying harder and start thinking differently.
12.2 The Ocean We Are
Picture a vast blue ocean in constant motion. Red islands rise above its surface and sink back down. These islands look like fixed points, separate from the water. They represent the moments we identify, the events we mark, the things we observe and define.
But the islands are the ocean. They’re made of water, formed by currents, shaped by the same forces moving everything else. The separation is interpretation. The islands are the ocean.
We are those islands. The interpretations we build, the experiences we have, the thoughts that feel so distinct. All of it is produced by causation. The ocean doesn’t stop at the shore of our awareness.
12.2.1 The Flow of Causation
A cut on a finger closes. We say “with enough time, the wound will heal.” But time doesn’t heal anything. Platelets form clots, immune cells clear debris, fibroblasts create new tissue. The healing happens through biological processes responding to damage. Time just measures how long those processes take.
Put a cake in the oven at 350 degrees for thirty minutes. Time shows up in the instruction, but heat bakes the cake. Heat denatures proteins, caramelizes sugars, triggers leavening agents. Cold ovens produce no baking, regardless of how long you wait. Time tracks the baking. Heat causes it.
A message drifts in a bottle for years before washing ashore. Currents and waves determined where it traveled. A clock ticks because stored energy drives its mechanism. Time measures these processes. It doesn’t create them.
Causation drives change. Time describes it.
12.2.2 The Limits of Maps
Science has mapped the islands with remarkable precision. Newton’s laws predict how objects move. Einstein’s equations describe how mass affects spacetime. These models work. They let us build bridges, launch satellites, measure cosmic distances.
But models describe patterns in observations, not the mechanisms creating those patterns. Newton’s equations tell us how an apple falls. They don’t explain what gravity is or how one mass influences another. Einstein’s spacetime curvature describes gravitational effects mathematically without explaining how influence propagates between masses.
The distinction matters. Models organize what we observe. Causation produces what we observe. Both are real, but they operate at different levels.
Scientific models succeed because they describe consistent patterns in how processes interact. The equations describe relationships between measurements. Those measurements interpret happening we can detect electromagnetically. What we measure depends on our detection methods, which means our models map the slice of causation we can access, not all of causation.
12.2.3 Inside and Outside
Internally, each person moves through a landscape of thoughts and perceptions. The red islands of memory and understanding form everything as it’s known from within. This is the reality that feels most immediate and real.
From the outside, a different world exists. Other processes can’t access the islands, only the waves created by action, the effects left behind.
Internally, the islands stand out: thoughts, events, moments of clarity. The Blue Space operates as continuous ocean. Both views are real. Both exist simultaneously.
We are the ocean.
Your internal experience is real. The waves you create are real. Both are the same process viewed from different positions. You exist as interpretation (the islands you see) and as causation (the waves you create). The ocean doesn’t stop being ocean when it forms islands. The islands don’t stop being islands when they sink back into the sea.
Neither domain is more fundamental. Reality propagates on the balance of both. The Blue Space is shared while Red Spaces are individual. You participate in the same causation as everyone else. Your interpretation belongs only to you. When coordination requires shared reference, the Blue Space provides it. When predicting outcomes, causal relationships prove more reliable than individual interpretations. Both domains are necessary. The shared nature of causation makes it more workable for coordination and prediction.
12.2.4 Inseparable Waters
The ocean moves as one. Waves rise and fall, creating patterns that form and dissolve, but the movement continues. Distinctions exist within the flow. They don’t stand apart from it.
The mind perceives patterns and builds relationships. The self looks like an island, separate from surrounding water. But the same interactions that form the waves create the interpreter. We notice the islands. We miss the movement beneath them.
The ancient debate about separation versus unity assumes these are opposites. They’re not. As waves carry the motion of the ocean while looking distinct, we come from causation while experiencing ourselves as separate. In the Interpretative Domain, you are distinct, individual, separate. In the Causation Domain, you are continuous with everything else. Both are true simultaneously.
Your effects extend beyond what you can see. Every action propagates through causation. You experience yourself as an island. You operate as part of the ocean.
12.2.5 Between One and Many
You exist in multiple places simultaneously.
In your own Red Space, you are who you understand yourself to be. Your self-understanding builds from internal narrative, emotional memory, culture, and identity, creating meaning that guides behavior and changes through interaction.
In others’ Red Spaces, you exist as their interpretation of you. Each person builds a separate model based on what they can perceive and how their own interpretative network processes that perception. These models differ from yours and from each other.
In the Blue Space, you exist as causal effects. Every action, signal, and interaction you create propagates through causation, regardless of how anyone interprets it.
What you intend differs from what others perceive. What you understand about yourself differs from how others model you. What others experience through you differs from what you experience. None of these perspectives captures you completely because “you” exists across orthogonal domains.
Chapter 2 introduced transcendence as the practice of seeing your own model as a model. When this happens functionally, you have deliberate access to the Blue Space. You can see that everything you perceive is interpretation while acting in a world that moves independently of that perception.
12.3 Transformation
Transformation creates new forms. Chapter 5 explored the mechanism through incoherence and impedance.
12.3.1 Mathematical and Natural Transforms
The Fourier Transform shows how we understand signals. When you listen to an orchestra, you hear all instruments playing at once. That’s the time domain, experiencing the signal as it flows. If you want to see what’s inside the signal, you apply a transform. Each instrument shows up separately: violins here, cellos there, trumpets in another range. Same music, completely different view. That’s the frequency domain.
The transform maps directly to causation and interpretation. The time domain is like the Causation Domain, where everything flows continuously. The frequency domain is like the Interpretative Domain, where we transform continuous flow into distinct components we can recognize and work with. We exist in three positions: outside (observing the flow), inside (being part of the flow), and as the transforming mechanism between them.
Some mathematical transforms show how systems settle after being disturbed. Others expose patterns that repeat at different scales. Each transform offers a new lens on the same subject.
Mathematical transforms describe static mappings. Category theory provides functors and natural transformations between structures, but mathematics maps what exists rather than creates new realities. A tree grows differently, changing how it processes sunlight through more leaves, different angles, new chemical pathways, transforming itself while operating.
Natural transforms create new realities while mathematical transforms only map existing ones. Reality feels alive in ways equations don’t because transformation happens dynamically.
Causation operates through physical and energetic interactions. Interpretation develops as responses to these interactions, forming adaptive models that guide subsequent engagement. These domains are orthogonal views of the same underlying activity. Transforms make their relationship explicit, offering a way to track how interactions develop into more complex forms.
12.3.2 The Tree as Process
Consider the tree. Roots anchor it and draw nutrients from soil. The trunk transports water and nutrients throughout the network. Leaves capture energy from sunlight and exchange gases with atmosphere. Each component works according to its own causal rules, yet together they form an integrated system that adapts through interaction.
Within the tree, interactions create feedback loops. Roots absorb nutrients, which the trunk distributes to support leaf function. Leaves create energy, which fuels the entire network, enabling further growth. The feedback cycle sustains the tree and lets it adjust to environmental changes.
The tree grows and changes form continuously. Leaves fall, decay enriches soil. The process maintains continuity while transformation happens. The tree adapts, integrating past activity into new forms rather than remaining fixed.
In cognition, sensory input gets handled through memory and reasoning, resulting in actions and ideas that engage the world. In societies, governance and communication create cultural and economic exchange.
12.4 Our Position
Our minds operate through electromagnetic mechanisms. This sets what we can see and what stays hidden.
12.4.1 The Interpretation Boundary
Everything we detect involves variations in electric and magnetic fields. Our instruments, our brains, our most sophisticated sensors respond only to these changes. Engaging electromagnetically creates our interpretation boundary.
Below this boundary, causal interactions happen by other means. Above it, we build internal models from the signals we receive. At the boundary itself, causation can be interpreted via our form of engagement.
Gravity works below our boundary. Masses influence each other via interactions that produce no variations we can detect. When we detect “gravitational waves,” we observe how gravitational influence affects atoms in our detectors. The gravitational interaction per se stays outside our interpretive reach.
Quantum entanglement works here too. Connected particles influence each other across vast distances without signals we can detect directly. The hidden interaction explains why we model it probabilistically. We see effects when we force measurements, but the underlying interaction stays hidden from direct observation.
The interpretation boundary explains quantum mechanics’ measurement problem. We use EM detection to probe interactions that work by other means. Wave function “collapse” marks the moment interaction crosses into our detectable domain via measurement.
Neutrinos interact via the weak force and gravity. We detect them only when they occasionally produce charged particles that create variations in fields we can measure. Most pass by unnoticed because they work by means our tools are blind to.
What we observe represents the slice where interaction produces EM effects. The remainder operates outside our detection threshold. Dark matter, quantum foundations, the detailed mechanism of gravitational interaction may represent activity we can’t access.
Our tools create our interpretation boundary. Most causal activity happens below our threshold. Our kind of meaning-making happens above it from the signals we can receive.
This is why it’s called Natural Reality. What we consider “natural” depends on our position within the interpretation boundary. The activity we model, the patterns we recognize, and the logic we apply all come from our particular slice of the Causation Domain. Beyond our threshold, causation works by means so different from our experience that our concept of ‘natural’ loses meaning. We call it Natural Reality because it maps reality as natural to processes like us.
12.4.2 The Reachable Universe
Detection methods define the scientific horizon. Everything we study, measure, and predict depends on electromagnetic variations that instruments can engage with.
This boundary follows from our fundamental nature. Human brains receive signals through senses tuned to electromagnetic radiation. Scientific instruments operate the same way. This determines what we can observe and what remains inaccessible.
Within this scope: stars shining, planets reflecting light. Even gravity enters the observable range when it affects measuring instruments. What we can access consists of whatever produces variations we can measure and interpret.
Outside this limit lies everything operating by non-electromagnetic means in the Causation Domain. Gravitational interaction between masses. Quantum entanglement across vast distances. We can see these only when they cross into detectable territory.
The scientific horizon expands as we develop better detection methods, but only when we imagine what we might be measuring. Radio astronomy exposed new phenomena because we wondered what signals might exist beyond visible light. X-ray telescopes opened different windows because we conceived of radiation we couldn’t see. Gravitational wave detectors push boundaries by measuring incredibly subtle responses to mass movements, but only because we imagined such responses were possible. Each advance demands curiosity about what might exist beyond current limitations.
Maps show this accessibility. The Standard Model describes particles we can find. General relativity charts spacetime from observations. Quantum mechanics models probabilities of measurements. These frameworks succeed because they describe patterns within the interpretive domain.
Universal laws are interpretations built from the consistency of what we observe. When we measure mass or charge, we find whatever aspects can interact with instruments. The equations we derive organize these interactions into predictable patterns. The patterns describe human engagement with the accessible slice of the Causation Domain.
Interpretive capabilities set this boundary. Beyond it, causation continues by means we cannot access.
12.5 Living as Process
You can account for causation now, not just react to interpretations. This changes how you make decisions, spot patterns, and participate in what’s happening.
Little Now and Big Now work differently. Little Now helps coordinate immediate actions, plan schedules, maintain stability. Big Now shows continuous causation where your choices create effects that propagate forward.
Financial decisions create causal conditions. Relationships establish patterns of interaction. Habits form reinforcing cycles. In Little Now, these look like isolated choices. In Big Now, they’re visible as continuous causation.
The change happens through practice. You ask “what’s causing this configuration now?” instead of “when will this change?” You work with the interactions creating problems instead of waiting for time to solve them. The questions themselves transform once you handle both domains.
What was hidden is now workable. Actions compound. Influence spreads through networks of interaction. Each choice either reinforces existing patterns or redirects them.
12.6 Closing Remarks
You’ve walked through the door.
The questions that trapped you in paradox dissolve. Mind and body are orthogonal views of one process, not separate entities needing connection. Free will and determinism describe different domains of the same activity. The self exists as both separate from and continuous with the world.
You exist as islands and as ocean. Your internal experience builds meaning while your actions propagate effects. Both happen simultaneously. The separation you feel is real. The continuity beneath it is real.
The interpretation boundary shows your position. Everything you detect comes through electromagnetic engagement. Most of causation operates beyond this threshold, invisible to your instruments but real in its effects. What you can access is a slice. What continues beyond it is vast.
Living as process means working with causation while building interpretation. The Process Universe was always your environment. Now you operate within it deliberately.
The Abstractionist’s Papers 